Without Reservations (5 page)

D
uring my first week in Paris I left the hotel each morning with a carefully worked out plan for the day. Knowing the plan was tucked safely in my handbag lessened the slightly chaotic feeling of living in a new kind of time, one that had no demands and no deadlines. I was unfamiliar with such a concept of time and it seemed slightly dangerous.

As I set out each day, I felt like a young child again, one who hadn’t yet learned the rules of manmade time: the rules of clocks and calendars, of weekdays and weekends. Except for the primitive markers of day and night, time lay ahead of me in a continuous, undefined mass. I began picturing it as some kind of strange but friendly beast whose appetites and desires were unknown to me. How, I wondered, was I to feed such an unpredictable creature? Having an agenda—I sometimes thought of it as a menu—helped give structure to this new kind of time.

At first I followed the plan precisely, as though I were a reporter on a daily deadline:
Wednesday morning, rue de Buci open-air market and rue du Cherche-Midi; afternoon, Picasso Museum and place des Vosges; evening, organ concert at Sainte-Chapelle.
I guess the idea of stepping out from behind the “camouflage of routine,” as someone once described it, still intimated me.

By the end of the week, however, I felt confident enough to exchange the old detailed plan for a new and much looser one. Instead
of singling out specific places of interest, I decided to concentrate on the neighborhood that was to be my home. This area consisted, roughly, of the streets that lay between the Seine and the boulevard Saint-Germain, plus the square mile or so surrounding the juncture of the 6th and 7th Arrondissements.

The new plan was simple. I would walk—street by fascinating street.

For several days I did just this, getting to know the bookstores and galleries, the cafés and fruit vendors, the patisseries and flower shops. Each day I ventured farther and farther, extending my map of the familiar, gradually finding the places in my neighborhood that were to become part of my daily life. The bookstore in the rue Jacob devoted to gardening. A café on the rue du Bac that served small elegant sandwiches and pastries so delicious they were famous throughout Paris. The small grocery shop near the rue de Verneuil. The newsstand run by Jacques and Monsieur Jacques. The out-of-the-way tea salon on the rue de Beaune. Presided over by Madame Cedelle, this soon became my favorite place for lunch or a late tea in the afternoon.

It was there that I met Liliane, the most extraordinary looking woman in all of Paris.

I first saw her standing at the entry to the crowded tea shop, a woman with dazzling, almond-shaped eyes and skin the color of cognac. Liliane, a slender figure perched on stiletto heels, wore a short, tight, green velvet skirt paired with a peplumed, deep rose satin blouse. Positioned on top of her long, dark hair was a tilted purple hat made of fluted straw; attached to it, a stiff mousseline veil that just covered her eyes. The total effect was that of some exotic parrot set down among sparrows. So physically striking was Liliane that the sight of her caused a brief silence in the tearoom, as diners paused to take in her presence.

I watched as Liliane’s eyes scanned the tea salon looking for an empty table. There was none. To my amazement, she approached me. “Would you mind sharing your table with me?” she asked in English, her clipped accent carrying hints of time spent in England.

“Of course not,” I said. “Please. Sit down.”

Actually, I was delighted to have company. I pushed aside the postcards I’d been writing to my sons and motioned to a chair. Sharing a meal, I had learned, was one of the best ways to meet people when traveling alone. Sometimes a real friendship grew out of such a chance meeting. More often, though, what developed was a temporary friendship, one rooted in the mutual need of two strangers to find companionship in unfamiliar surroundings.

Suddenly, Liliane’s voice interrupted my thoughts. “It’s one of my favorite photographs,” she said, pointing to a postcard lying on top of my purse.

The card, which I planned to send to a friend in New York, was a reproduction of a famous 1926 picture taken in Paris by the great Hungarian-born photographer André Kertész. A bold-looking, vivacious woman reclines on an Art Nouveau love seat, her arms and legs arranged with abandon against the plush velvet cushions. Her pose gives the effect of a woman dancing horizontally. Kertész, whom I had interviewed once for my newspaper, titled the image
Satiric Dancer.
A print of the photograph hung in my living room at home.

“It’s a favorite of mine, too,” I said, picking up the postcard. “There’s such joy and fearlessness in that face, isn’t there? It’s like the look you see on a child’s face before the age of reason sets in.” We both laughed. “But I’m curious. How did you become familiar with the photo?”

“I studied photography in New York for a while and fell in love with Kertész’s work,” she said. “Brassaï, too. Do you know Brassaï’s photos of Paris?”

Liliane had hit on a passion of mine: photography. Within minutes we were discussing Brassaï, also a Hungarian, who had moved to Paris, where he became famous for his pictures of Paris nightlife in the 1920s; and Atget, the venerated master photographer of the city, who, beginning in the 1890s, photographed Paris almost every day for more than twenty years. After agreeing that Atget was the architectural historian of Paris and Brassaï the Colette of the camera, we compared notes on cameras we liked and why color prints could never approach the beauty of black-and-white photographs.

We finished lunch and ordered coffee. Then more coffee. By this time we had traded our personal histories, or at least as much as we wished to trade. Liliane, who was born in Rio de Janeiro but grew up in London, ran an interior design business from her Chelsea flat. Her two children, both teenagers, were away at boarding school. She made no mention of their father. She did mention, however, that she was not alone in Paris; an Englishman named Justin had accompanied her. The purpose of the trip to Paris, Liliane said, was to visit her ailing aunt.

I was surprised by the warmth and openness of Liliane’s personality; it contrasted so strikingly with her exotic, unapproachable appearance. But even her warmth and charm could not completely dissipate my awareness of her astonishing looks; from time to time I found myself studying her face as one would a painting.

She seemed interested in my trip and asked question after question:
Don’t you get lonely? What did your sons think of your decision to do this? Don’t you worry about your job? Do you know people in Paris?
By the time we rose to leave, it was as though I’d had lunch with an old friend.

Outside we walked along the rue du Bac, stopping to peer into the shop windows at some amazing display of antiques or ancient jewelry. As we walked, I noticed how much attention Liliane’s
appearance commanded. Especially from men. I felt a twinge of envy, one I tried to brush aside. Liliane, I noticed, was not unaware of the stares she drew; she seemed to play to her audience in a flirtatious way, something she hadn’t done in the tea shop.

Before we parted, Liliane asked if I liked jazz. “Justin and I are going to a jazz club near your hotel after we visit my aunt,” she said. “Would you like to join us?”

“Yes, very much.” I agreed to meet them at La Villa at 10:30 that night. To my surprise, just before we parted, Liliane reached out and hugged me.

After leaving Liliane, I decided to walk over to the Musée d’Orsay. Along the way I saw a half-dozen things that made me think about pulling out my reporter’s notebook. A man sitting outside the museum impersonating the Mona Lisa; a dog roller-skating alongside his master; two women, identical twins who appeared to be in their seventies, dressed in matching pink outfits by Chanel; a man in a tall baker’s hat bicycling along the quai d’Orsay, a wedding cake balanced in the bike’s basket.

What great stories there are in Paris, I thought, half-convinced I should phone an editor and see if I could sell some ideas. The other half of me, however, stepped in quickly to remind me of why I came to Paris in the first place:
Remember
, this voice whispered,
you’re here to take a break from seeing life as “newspaper stories.”

But it was a difficult habit to quit. I loved my work; it was an important part of my identity. In the twenty years I’d been a reporter, I’d met people and gone through doors that were opened to me only because of my job. I’d met Princess Diana at the British Embassy
on her first trip to the United States in 1986 and interviewed Elie Wiesel in his New York apartment just after he’d won the Nobel Prize. I’d done stories on mothers who murdered their children, and spent four months in a psychiatric ward chronicling the life of a young psychiatrist. I’d profiled artists and actors and scientists and what I liked to think of as “extraordinary” ordinary people. I could think of no job more fascinating.

But the work has its perils: spending large chunks of time immersed in another person’s life makes it easier to lose track of one’s own place in the world. I was determined not to let that happen on this trip.

Still, when I saw a performance artist climbing a thirty-foot beanstalk constructed of green plastic, it took real self-discipline to talk myself out of doing an on-the-spot interview with “Jacques and His Greenstalk.”

On the way back to my hotel I passed a shop near rue Bonaparte that featured in its windows several mannequins dressed in Chinese cheongsam-style dresses. One particularly caught my eye—a beautiful black silk number with a mandarin collar and elegant frog fastenings that ran down the left side of the dress. When I moved closer to the window I saw the silk was subtly patterned: raised silk threads, gossamer as spiderwebs, formed what looked like black-on-black calligraphy. The effect was both elegant and mysterious, a design that revealed itself, like a secret, only to the intimate observer. Impulsively, I walked into the shop.

“Bonjour, madame,”
a voice sang out from somewhere in the back of the shop. It was a pleasant custom, the way French shopkeepers
greeted each customer personally, and one that ran counter to any notion of the French as rude and unfriendly.

“Bonjour,”
I sang back. Then to my utter surprise I heard myself say: “I’d like to try on the black dress in the window. Well, I mean, not the one in the window but one like it in my size.”

“Oui, madame,”
she said, eyeballing me from head to toe—the typical French approach, I had learned, in determining size.

That was all right with me. The truth is, I was sure that no size existed in this particular dress that would fit me, so unforgiving was its narrow cut. Still, for some reason, I was willing to give the dress a chance, even if—
quelle horreur!
—it meant humiliating myself in the eyes of the salesclerk.

As I waited for her to bring the dress, I wondered what was behind my sudden need to acquire a glamorous black silk cheongsam. Was it the challenge of meeting Liliane—the exotic, fabulous-looking, man-attracting Liliane—at La Villa? The idea almost made me laugh out loud.

“Here it is, madame,” said the saleswoman, interrupting my thoughts. She hung the silk dress in a small room and ushered me in, tactfully leaving me alone to try it on.

Without much optimism I removed my slacks and blouse. I slipped the dress on over my head. To my surprise it kept on going, undeterred even when it encountered my hips. After hooking up the little frog closures and pulling in my stomach muscles, I turned to look in the mirror. Not bad. In fact, better than I would have thought possible. When I moved, I noticed that the slits on either side of the dress flashed just the slightest bit of red silk lining, another elegant secret.